How Much is the Steroid Cream Market Worth?

We all know that big pharma makes lots of money selling steroid creams, but just how much exactly?

I was asking myself this question when I stumbled on a document about Eumovate, a cream which I dub my own "personal poison". Eumovate is a mild/moderate strength steroid cream which is available over the counter  and  one of the main creams that I used on my face for the 15 years that I was addicted to steroids.

The document is an reclassification submission from back in the year 2000 to allow Eumovate to be sold OTC. The bit that interested me was:

"In the period from May 1990 until end of Feb 2000 alone, approximately 24 million tubes of Eumovate cream and approximately 40 million tubes of Eumovate ointment have been sold worldwide."

Now bearing in mind that these sales figures were just for one type of steroid cream, it got me to wondering what the worldwide steroid cream market is like. A little investigation led me to this document, which was a real shocker. It says:

"They estimated the global eczema therapeutics market to value $2,035.5m in 2010. It is expected to grow a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 8.2% to $3,834.5m by 2018. This growth is primarily attributed to an increased prevalence rate and increased patient awareness of the disease pattern. In 2010, the prevalence of eczema reported in seven major geographies (the US, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Japan), was between 10-20%. GlobalData expects that the number of eczema patients will increase, along with an increase in prevalence."

Yeah, "increase in prevalence". I wonder why?

I should point out that these figures are for the market as a whole, including emolients, but the document does go on to explain that:

"Among all the available treatment options, topical corticosteroids hold a large share and dominate the market. "

..so we can presume that quite a big chunk of the figure above is wealth created by the steroid cream market.

Another site I found states that:

"Topical steroids are the gold standard treatment for atopic dermatitis with more than $1 billion worth of prescriptions written annually by US physicians. "

So the US market alone is worth more than $1 billion a year.

Wow...get all these people dependent on these creams and we have a real goldmine, don't we?

Let's all raise awareness and work on getting these figures down!

...and I don't want any of you sneaking off and buying shares in the market.....!